With 420,000 British casualties, The Somme was a massacre. On the first day alone 60,000 fell, 20,000 of them dead. Almost two thirds of all officers to die during the battle fell on that first day in July 1916.

Reeling from the disaster at Gallipoli and with no decisive advances on the Western Front, French Marshal Joseph Jacques Césaire Joffre offered a solution with a campaign in Artois to force the Germans back.

In military folklore, a cavalry charge is something glorious. In reality, it was a filthy, harrowing business for horse and rider alike. Jack Laiste of Birmingham was a 17-year-old lancer, proudly riding off to war on his charger, Queenie. It was November 1914 in a country lane in Northern France. All was quiet. The sun was shining. He recalls:

It was another world. In her warm, cosy flat in Wolverhampton, 95-year-old Clarice Onions casts her mind back to the long, hot summer of 1914. George V was on the throne. Herbert Asquith was Prime Minister. Little Clarice’s father Thomas Ricketts was a 27-year-old railway worker and a former soldier, still on the reserve list.